NO PLACE LIKE HOME

With plug-and-play rehearsing, recording,
performing space, and more, HOME aims to be a
base for Nashville’s music makers

By Nicole Keiper

Logan Crowell’s coming-to-Nashville story will sound familiar — singer-songwriter excelling in a smaller town comes to Music City to take a swing, gets bowled over by the talent and industry insularity. And like many other transplants in this five-year town, Crowell gamely and repeatedly asked for advice on how to get plugged in.
“Everybody just kept telling me to go to bars,” the Little Rock expat says, now about three years in. “‘Just go to bars, man, that’s where you do that.’ OK, I like going to bars and I like drinking, so for me that’s not a good place to be all the time. Especially when I came out here to be really productive and goal-oriented. … I remember thinking, ‘That’s really weird that the only place to go to do what you ultimately came here to do is bars.’”
That’s where Crowell’s Nashville route takes a less-traveled turn. Chewing on what he saw as an obvious problem — “You have just crazy, phenomenally talented people converging on this town with no real place to go and start working” — the musician and then-Belmont Adult Degree student got hit with a bolt of inspiration.
The solution: a “community center for all the music people,” with practical resources, built-in networking opportunities, and a nonprofit framework to keep a focus on affordability.
That was January of 2016; by April of 2018, Crowell was welcoming the first visitors into East Nashville’s HOME, a fully fleshed-out musician’s hub replete with rehearsal space, a recording studio (set up by producer/engineer Anthony Falcone, who’s worked with T.I., Jennifer Lopez, and others), a performance space, and coworking/lounge areas, plus a calendar full of opportunities to meet, share, collaborate, and learn from other musicians and industry folks.
“I call it a ‘content production facility,’” Crowell says, “because to call it rehearsal space or to call it a studio or to call it a venue just doesn’t really capture what I believe is the game-changing aspect of what we’ve done here.”
That game-changer, from Crowell’s perspective: In HOME, musicians have a place to go that readily and specifically facilitates productivity and connection.
The organization offers a mix of membership options, all of which include access to the full run of HOME offerings. Their highest-level “Pro” membership, at $100 a month, includes 24/7 access to the space and the lowest hourly rates for rehearsing, recording, and performing ($10, $20 and $30, respectively, where $5-a-month “Online” members pay three times that). Everything’s set up to be plug-and-play, to allow for multitrack recording on the live stage or live streaming from the rehearsal space.
The community aspect comes in digital form (a searchable online member portal, built to help bands find members and songwriters to find engineers, and so on) and in person. Quarterly, HOME contracts with mentors who host workshops and offer one-on-one time (producer Lamont “Logic” Coleman and publishing pro Thalia Ewing are among the recent contributors). HOME also hosts weekly “Variety Nights,” with an open jam in the rehearsal space, listening party in the studio, open mic in the venue, and rounds of “Cowrite Roulette” with songwriters tossing names into a jar for random pairings with new collaborators.
Crowell’s hope: In time for his own five-year mark, for the HOME he founded to have helped foster teams, projects, friendships, and, ideally, thriving music careers.
“Our measure of success is by the success of our members,” he says. “By the projects that are coming out of here, the people that are getting traction, and the relationships that are being built.”